Emre Baransel - Oracle Blog

After one year of hard work, it's very nice to introduce the Oracle Data Guard 11gR2 Administration book written by me and Nassyam Basha. As for me, i can honestly say that it has been a really good book and will help its reader a lot to learn and implement Data Guard. We wanted to prepare a book that starts Data Guard from scratch and covers all important details of it with clear and easy to follow examples and i think we succeeded. Hope readers will think the same.

There is a lot of information we prepared about what this book covers, who this book is for etc. on book's web page. So, I will not mention about those here. But I wanted to write about the following topics, because I think they are important for potential readers (and writers).

The "Beginner's Guide" format is one of the writing templates of Packt. "Beginner's Guide" doesn't mean to be a "light" book in terms of content. This format was designed to help the "beginner" reader to understand the subject easily with more examples, hands-ons and Q&As. However the book covers all Data Guard topics from beginning to the advanced topics. You can see this when you look at the Table of Contents.

We of course discussed if the book should be for 12c. However most of the DBAs who will read this book will need to configure Data Guard 11gR2 for their production systems (and the rest will configure in lower releases but not 12c for now). As we all know a new version needs at least 1-2 years to be used on production systems. A new version book would be only informative but not practical for now. On the other side this book is a hands-on book to help DBAs built Data Guard configurations and DBAs will mostly work on 11gR2 for at least several years. It's not certain but we may also upgrade the book for 12c in the meantime.

First of all i have to say that it has been more difficult than i thought to make time to write. Last 12 months have been the busiest time of my life. I had to write chapters at nights and weekends which of course affected my social and family life. Before authoring this book, in 2009 i contributed to “RMAN 11g Backup & Recovery” book from Oracle Press by writing a chapter for that book. So, i should have known what writing a book is like but I think, idea of authoring a book make me forget that :) Preparing the outline, writing the first drafts, editor reviews, technical reviews, technical editor reviews, final review, in the mean time increasing versions of the drafts, writing the preface, writing the Title Information Sheet, review of the preface, review of the Title Information Sheet and so on. At the end one year full of writing :) When i look to my mailbox, the folder containing the e-mails related with the book has 1200 e-mails inside. These are the e-mails that i'm in and i'm sure there are many more that was sent inside Packt team. This may show how busy were the people in this team and how much effort was shown. At the end i'm happy to hold the book in my hands and i can say it's a strange feeling to browse through the book :) Thanks again to everyone in the team from the four corners of the world that made this book possible.

We received some (honest) reviews from very important Oracle professionals that the book is really good. Our editors and technical reviewers also made very nice comments during the writing phase. (Thanks again to Syed Jaffar Hussain, Michael Seberg, Joel Perez and the Packt editor team for their valuable comments and edits) Seeing these nice feedbacks were the motivation of writing. As i said, i also trust in this book and I’m pretty sure it'll be a good resource to learn Data Guard.

I already thanked at the beginning pages of the book but here i don't want to miss and thank again to my family for their support and my friend Nassyam Basha for all his effort and friendship.